Samsung Gear VR Now Supports Native WebVR Format

It has been revealed this week that the Samsung Gear VR virtual reality headset now supports the web’s native VR format and is now capable of adding extra immersion to your web browsing.

Expanding the capabilities of the already included Samsung Gear VR web browser the smartphone powered VR hardware now allows users to browse the web based virtual reality experiences that are becoming more widely available.

Due to the new availability of the support for native WebVR format the company has introduced the current release with experimental support for WebVR at the current time. Although even in its current state will allow users to enjoy full immersion when a website that has supported content ready to view is visited. To enjoy the new VR support users need to be enabled the feature themselves, and due to its early stage of development may cause a few problems.

Samsung Announce Gear VR with WebVR support :

Hi, Last week at Samsung we released our VR Browser – Samsung Internet for GearVR 1.0 (out of Beta) – with added functionality including improved VR video support and integration with our mobile browser which lets you easily transition from a mobile experience into an immersive GearVR experience.

We at Samsung are actively working on and committed to support WebVR. The WebVR support is “experimental” status as the specification is still evolving. The current release is using the deprecated API set, and we hope to update it soon to the latest WebVR draft.

To enable WebVR all you need to do is visit the internet://webvr-enable<internet://webvr-enable/> . internet://webvr-disable<internet://webvr-disable/> to disable WebVR support (but why would you ever want to do that 🙂 ).

This version of the Samsung Internet for GearVR has support for WebGL (on by default) and is based on the same open source chromium engine version (M44) as our latest version of the mobile Samsung Internet for Android product (which is now downloadable from the Google Play Store on most of the recent Samsung mobile devices https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sec.android.app.sbrowser).

Happy to hear any feedback or questions about our web VR user agent.

Thanks and Best,

Laszlo

For more information on the new Gear VR WebVR support jump over to the developer website for details via the link below.